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Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained using human feedback for safety and alignment with human values, alignment decisions often overlook human social diversity. This study examines how incorporating pluralistic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Dalia Ali , Dora Zhao , Allison Koenecke , Orestis Papakyriakopoulos

The increasing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into decision-making frameworks has exposed significant vulnerabilities to social compliance, specifically sycophancy and conformity. However, a critical research gap exists…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Long Zhang , Wei-neng Chen

This position paper argues that sycophancy in LLMs is a boundary failure between social alignment and epistemic integrity. Existing work often operationalizes sycophancy through external behavior such as agreement with incorrect user…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jiechen Li , Catherine A. Barry , Rishika Randev , Janet Chen , Ella Jorgensen , Brinnae Bent

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently become a critical objective of model developers. In response, a growing body of work has been investigating how safety alignment can be bypassed through various jailbreaking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Jason Vega , Junsheng Huang , Gaokai Zhang , Hangoo Kang , Minjia Zhang , Gagandeep Singh

Sycophantic response patterns in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly claimed in the literature. We review methodological challenges in measuring LLM sycophancy and identify five core operationalizations. Despite sycophancy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jan Batzner , Volker Stocker , Stefan Schmid , Gjergji Kasneci

Large language models (LLMs) have traditionally been aligned through one-size-fits-all approaches that assume uniform human preferences, fundamentally overlooking the diversity in user values and needs. This paper introduces a comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Jia-Nan Li , Jian Guan , Songhao Wu , Wei Wu , Rui Yan

Personality traits have long been studied as predictors of human behavior. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest similar patterns may emerge in artificial systems, with advanced LLMs displaying consistent behavioral…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Pengrui Han , Rafal Kocielnik , Peiyang Song , Ramit Debnath , Dean Mobbs , Anima Anandkumar , R. Michael Alvarez

The conformity effect describes the tendency of individuals to align their responses with the majority. Studying this bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial, as LLMs are increasingly used in various information-seeking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiaochen Zhu , Caiqi Zhang , Tom Stafford , Nigel Collier , Andreas Vlachos

Large language models are often described as sycophantic, in the sense that they appear to flatter users or mirror their beliefs. We argue that this label is conceptually misleading: sycophancy implies motives and strategic intent, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Federico Germani , Giovanni Spitale

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy: agreement with user stance even when it conflicts with the model's opinion. While prior work has mostly studied this in single-agent settings, it remains underexplored in collaborative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Vira Kasprova , Amruta Parulekar , Abdulrahman AlRabah , Krishna Agaram , Ritwik Garg , Sagar Jha , Nimet Beyza Bozdag , Dilek Hakkani-Tur

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical and care settings. This exploratory study investigates whether LLMs exhibit sycophantic behavior - adapting their responses to social expectation signals rather than maintaining…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Christian Kolb

As LLMs expand from assistance to decision support, a dangerous pattern emerges: fluent agreement without calibrated judgment. Low-friction assistants can become sycophantic, baking in implicit assumptions and pushing verification costs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Raunak Jain

This study evaluates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, testing three configurations: (1) with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), (2) without SFT, and (3)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Md Nayem Uddin , Chitta Baral

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, it typically assumes homogeneous preferences across users, overlooking diverse human values and minority…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Yijiang River Dong , Tiancheng Hu , Yinhong Liu , Ahmet Üstün , Nigel Collier

Sycophancy refers to the tendency of a large language model to align its outputs with the user's perceived preferences, beliefs, or opinions, in order to look favorable, regardless of whether those statements are factually correct. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 María Victoria Carro

Large language models (LLMs) are known to abandon their initial stance to conform to user pushback. While prior research largely attributes this behavior to sycophancy learned during reinforcement learning from human feedback, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kevin H. Guo , Chao Yan , Avinash Baidya , Katherine Brown , Xiang Gao , Juming Xiong , Zhijun Yin , Bradley A. Malin

Pluralistic alignment is typically operationalised as preference aggregation: producing responses that span (Overton), steer toward (Steerable), or proportionally represent (Distributional) diverse human values. We argue that aggregation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Varad Vishwarupe , Nigel Shadbolt , Marina Jirotka

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing a wide range of general inquiries and tasks. Despite this, fine-tuning aligned LLMs on smaller, domain-specific datasets, critical to adapting them to specialized…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Guanlin Li , Kangjie Chen , Shangwei Guo , Jie Zhang , Han Qiu , Chao Zhang , Guoyin Wang , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly consulted for high-stakes life advice, yet they lack standard safeguards against providing confident but misguided responses. This creates risks of sycophancy and over-confidence. This paper…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Joshua Adrian Cahyono , Saran Subramanian

The rapid advancement of language models (LMs) necessitates robust alignment with diverse user values. However, current preference optimization approaches often fail to capture the plurality of user opinions, instead reinforcing majority…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Louis Castricato , Nathan Lile , Rafael Rafailov , Jan-Philipp Fränken , Chelsea Finn